Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Zipp highlights four post-war construction projects in New York City that significantly altered the landscape, delivering a measured critique of urban renewal at a time when “city blocks were literally uprooted, broken down, and reconstructed in geometric arrangements that produced a new, unfamiliar sense of order.” The author looks at efforts that helped to create and maintain Manhattan’s global influence on politics and the arts: The United Nations headquarters, for instance, designed by a diverse group of 11 architects, became “a kind of international territory, considered inviolable under U.S. law, and figuratively, politically, and aesthetically [belonged] to no one nation.” And Lincoln Center traded “blocks of tenements, warehouses, factories, and storefronts for a world-class, modern performing arts complex that capped New York’s campaign to become the cultural capital of the world.” But the plans that perhaps most directly affected Manhattan residents include the construction of Stuyvesant Town in the 1940s and “vast belts of public housing... erected in East Harlem” in the 1950s and ’60s. Though at times overly academic, Zipp’s deeply-researched and comprehensive volume manages to give readers a strong sense of history and a relevant social context in which to view it. Photos. (June)